• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3152 0

sent Warren trotting down the street to the nearby Hinky Dinky supermarket to buy bread at retail. Warren did not enjoy this errand because he was quickly recognized once inside. “Hellooooooo, Mr. Buffett!” the clerks would call out to him, loud enough for everyone to hear, as he slunk through the store, “trying to look inconspicuous,” weighed down with armfuls of loaves. Ernest resented the Hinky Dinky, which, like Sommers, his other major competitor in Dundee, was run by a Jewish family. It rankled him to pay good money to a competitor, much less somebody Jewish. Like much of America before mid-century, Omaha practiced de facto segregation by both religion and race. Jews and Christians (and even Catholics and Protestants) lived essentially separate lives, with social clubs, civic groups, and many businesses refusing to accept Jews as members or hire them as employees. Ernest and Howard used the code name “Eskimos” to make offensive remarks about Jews when they were out in public. Since anti-Semitism was so much a matter of course in society at the time, Warren never gave their attitudes a thought.

Ernest, in fact, was an authority figure to Warren, and he only escaped that authority when he was at school, and for a few hours every Saturday when his grandfather put him to work on the delivery truck. Unloading groceries from the truck was exhausting work, and Warren started to figure out how much he disliked manual labor.

“There was this driver, Eddie, that I thought was a hundred years old. He was probably about sixty-five, although he had driven a mule truck back when Buffett & Son delivered that way.

“He had the craziest delivery system that involved going first to Benson, then about five miles back to Dundee to drop somebody’s groceries off, then back to Benson. All this during wartime gas rationing. Finally I asked why, and he gave me this disgusted look and said, ‘If it’s early enough, we may catch her when she’s undressed.’” Warren at first had no idea what this cryptic phrase meant. “He took the groceries up to the house personally in the mornings while I carried twenty-four-bottle boxes of empty soda bottles that were being returned to the store. Eddie would be there ogling Mrs. Kaul, the best-looking customer, trying to catch her undressed.” Mrs. Kaul was Clo-Ann Kaul’s mother, and while Warren was hauling empty soda bottles, Clo-Ann was ignoring him. “I may have been the lowest-paid person to ever work in the grocery business. I didn’t learn anything—except that I didn’t like hard work.”

Warren took his battle for autonomy home to Ernest’s Sunday dinner table. He had despised everything green from birth, except money. Now, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and asparagus lined Warren’s plate like foot soldiers in a battle of wills. With his parents, he had generally gotten his way. Ernest, however, brooked no nonsense. While Alice tried coaxing her nephew, his grandfather glared from his seat at one end of the table, waiting, waiting, waiting for Warren to finish his vegetables. “You sat at the table for two hours to finish your asparagus, but he always won in the end.”

In most other ways, however, being at Ernest’s brought Warren a large measure of freedom. In his grandfather’s garage, he had spotted Doris’s blue Schwinn bicycle with her initials on it—a gift from Ernest, left behind when they went to Washington. Warren had never owned a bicycle. “A bicycle was a pretty big present in those days, you know,” he says. He started riding Doris’s. After a while he traded it in, using it as most of the down payment on a boy’s bike.25 Nobody said anything. Warren had that “halo.”

His grandfather doted on him, in his way. At night he and Ernest listened with “reverential attention” to Ernest’s favorite radio host, Fulton Lewis Jr., who expounded constantly on the theme that America should not get involved in foreign wars. Ernest needed no convincing.

After Fulton Lewis Jr. recharged his conservative energies, Ernest would gather his latest thoughts on the best seller he was writing. He had decided to call it How to Run